Place two businesses with exactly the same technology side by side and one will outperform the other. Why? Simply put, because of the people and the culture that is created within the framework of that business.
Your culture is made up of two components Values and Principles.
Your culture impacts both loudly and silently, yet always profoundly, on the outcomes you achieve. Similarly the outcomes (in other words the goals) you choose drive the culture that develops in your business. The diagram below illustrates this interplay.
As a further illustration:
Imagine you have a Safety Outcome in which you target less than two deaths each year. (Don't laugh, I worked with a mining company almost 20 years ago that had this as an unwritten, yet well known, target!). How committed do you think people within the organization were?
Contrast this with a culture that is built on trust and commitment. A principle based environment where people have the freedom to make decisions that provide customers with better service - for example Virgin or Southwest Airlines. These two organizations have some of the best performance results in their industry on the globe.
Below you will learn how to develop (or re-develop) these two key components of your culture.
STEP ONE: ARTICULATE THE VALUES
Articulating the values that you want to drive the organization is an important part of the visioning process for any organization.
Most organizations identify 6-8 core values they want their business to operate under, that will drive the outcomes achieved by the business. Click here for tips on developing team values. A leadership team that uses their values, to guide every decision they make, unerringly moves their organization to high performance. In order to create your guiding principles you must have already identified your top 6-8 core values.
STEP TWO: IDENTIFY THE IRRATIONAL RULES, POLICIES, PROCEDURES
Work with your front-line team members to identify the policies, rules and procedures in your workplace, which either
have a negative impact on morale or
are unnecessary obstacles in the way of getting your product or service being delivered to your customer cheaper, quicker and of high quality
These guiding principles you may not refer to daily, but they are useful to ensure that the long-term culture of the business is not eroded by decisions made for short-term expediency. The principles are derived directly from the values that you previously articulated.
For each value create a statement that completes the statement
"People will be ...(insert value)... when they". Here's a couple of examples:
Value = Flexibility
People will be flexible when they:
Work within a structure that encourages and supports multi-skilling
Are guided by principles rather than driven by rules
Know and understand customer needs
Involved in decision-making that impacts on them
Are involved in planning and organizing change
Understand and appreciate the reason for change
Value = Technical Competency
People are technically competent when they:
Use their training with accuracy, care and attention to detail
Learn and implement skills
Participate in multi-skilling
Are empowered to take decisions in technical areas
Are highly trained and kept informed on technical developments
As you develop your principles keep these guidelines in mind:
Involve team members in developing the principles
The principles need to be consistent with the Vision
What experience the organization wants to deliver to its customers
Ensure the principle doesn't outline the exact "how to do", but does emphasize what is important to the business
Guiding Principles are critical for long-term consistency.
As time goes by and people come and go from the organization, and the original vision for how the business would conduct itself can often get lost.
Example of how Guiding Principles can stop poor Organizational Choices that have a negative impact on Culture
We once had a team leader join us, some years after start-up, and he was finding it very frustrating because of the amount of time he needed to spend on involving his team members in making decisions. One day he jokingly (but 1/2 seriously) said to me: "Let's stop all this employee involvement. It takes too long. It's far quicker just to tell people what to do".
Even though I empathized with him I was able to have a discussion with him that went something like this:
Our Performance Outcomes are driven by our Values. As you know one of our Values is Flexibility. We chose this Value because we know that it drives the behaviors that enable us to more rapidly and easily achieve our goals. Some of the principles around Flexibility that we identified were:
People are Flexible when they:
Involved in decision-making that impacts on them
Understand and appreciate the reason for change
Are involved in planning and organizing change
If we were to stop involving people in the decision-making process and keeping information up to them we may risk losing the value of Flexibility. In the short term we may not notice a difference, other than decisions get made faster , but over the long term we'll definitely have team members who are less engaged, committed and involved with the business.
With the ability to refer back to your guiding principles, when a significant design choice is proposed - such as stopping employee involvement - you are able to ensure that short-term expedient choices don't have a long-term negative impact on the outcomes the business wants to achieve.
The point is that before members of your organization make specific design choices, they must recognise the principles behind those choices. That way, months or years later, the design choices people are making will be based on carefully articulated principles, or guidelines that fit the business strategy and long-term outcomes desired by the organization - not just meet short-term expediency.
STEP FOUR: APPLY THE PRINCIPLES
One of my favorite exercises with groups is to ask them for examples of how they've used the organization's values whilst making decisions in the past week.
95% of the time, most groups have difficulty clearly stating their values and, certainly didn't consciously use them to make decisions!
Placing Values/Principles in cards and handbooks do not bring them to life!
Your principles and values must align behavior and drive performance. To make them real leaders must talk about them, explain them, defend them constantly, publicly, consistently (and if they can't they should either change the principles or leave the organization).
Many organizations spend (read waste) a lot of time developing their principles and/or values. Maybe even having them printed up and placed in cards and handbooks. And that is often as far as it goes. This process (develop values stick them in a handbook) is followed by many thousands of organizations and all it does is breed cynicism and discontent. You know this to be true - you probably work in one of those organizations!
Leaders communicate their commitment to the organizational values and principles more by their actions than their words. For example at one of the companies I worked at, Teamwork and Flexibility were two of our values.
One time we had a major fire in the facility and for the next fortnight everyone in the facility was involved in the cleaning and sweeping up of the mess - from the Site Manager to the Receptionist to the team members whose 'job' it was. Does that mean the Site Manager and Receptionist should be on the end of a broom all the time - of course not. However, if in the moment it is the right thing to do then you must illustrate the principle by living the principle ... of being a team member and being flexible in what you will do.
Principle-Based High Performance Leaders consistently use these three questions in their decision-making process:
Is this decision aligned with our principles and values?"
"How will this decision affect our business over the next 3,5,10 years?"
"What is the possible impact it could have on how our people behave and feel?"
On the Organization Design page I said "Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get". Here's an example from history of how managers didn't think through the consequences of a design choice:
When industrial organizations first came into being, specialization was the name of the game. A person was expected to do only one task and get very good at that task.
This design choice lead to one-man-one-job thinking.
Over time we ended up with demarcation and inflexibility in the workplace. (I recall working in an organization in the 1980's that had 37 unions on site - all bickering with each other over who had rights to do what.
A design choice that in fact led to a lot of lost productivity. In fact we lost 25% of available workdays to strike action because of the unions fighting amongst themselves over who had the rights to performance particular tasks!).
This is an example of not thinking through the results a design choice could lead to and having poorly articulated and applied guiding principles.
Use the questions above as you make similar type decisions to give yourself a much better chance of making design choices that will lead to the long-term health and agility of your business.
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, but over the long term we'll definitely have team members who are less engaged, committed and involved with the business.
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